Empire Encounters, Welsh National Culture and Imperial Politics: Lady and Lord Llanofer, Dwarkanath Tagore and Rungo Bapojee Gupte

This article presents the first case study of the cultural enmeshing of Welsh and imperial ideologies as a result of Empire encounters by analysing the visits of zamindar and Calcutta businessman Dwarkanath Tagore and his nephew Chunder Mohun Chatterjee to the Abergavenny eisteddfodau at the invitation of Lady Augusta Hall of Llanofer. The celebrity cult surrounding Tagore will be compared to the unsuccessful diplomatic campaign of Maratha sardar Rungo Bapojee Gupte on behalf of the deposed raja of Satara, and Gupte's political association with radical Whig MP Lord Benjamin Hall of Llanofer, demonstrating fundamental differences in the contemporary treatment of different regions and rulers of the Indian subcontinent, and their reflection in the Anglophone historiography on India. This essay will lay the groundwork for attempting more differentiated approaches to researching imperial influences on smaller European cultures and different regions of the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century.